Beaumont: San Gorgonio Pass Gateway

The San Gorgonio Pass has been a travel corridor since at least eighteen sixty-two, when surveyor William Bradshaw plotted the Bradshaw Trail through it, connecting San Bernardino to gold strikes on the Colorado River.

The Southern Pacific Railroad followed the same natural gap through the mountains in the eighteen seventies, and a townsite grew around its stop. Developers renamed it Beaumont in eighteen eighty-seven, taking the French phrase for beautiful mountain. The town incorporated on November eighteenth, nineteen twelve.

For most of the twentieth century Beaumont stayed small, a highway pit stop between Los Angeles and the desert. Then master-planned communities began filling the benchlands in the two thousands, and the population jumped from roughly ten thousand to more than fifty thousand. The pass that guided stagecoaches and gold miners now funnels a morning commute.